Will the Real Conservatives Please Stand Up?

The real trouble behind the failed war in Iraq, oldstyleliberal believes, is the neo-cons.

The term, which is short for "neo-conservatives," applies to those whose politics derive from something that happened in the 1960s and '70s. In the later '60s, many on the American Left turned into radical revolutionaries, and near-chaos broke out in the wake of the Vietnam war.

Many former leftists, some of whom were once communists of one stripe or another, then felt "mugged by reality" and shifted their sentiments to an obdurate form of anti-communism. These former liberals called themselves "neo-conservatives."

Later, when the Cold War ended, neo-cons congratulated themselves on a worldview which held that America's first duty is to use any means possible to eliminate unfriendly, anti-democratic regimes around the world.

The Bush Administration has always been neo-con friendly, what with Dick Cheney being the Vice President and Donald Rumsfeld being the original Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld's underlings included the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, one of the leading neo-con thinkers.

In the post-Cold War world, the neo-cons saw a need to project American power, military and otherwise, into other arenas. It the post-9/11 world, Wolfowitz and those like him saw an opportunity to do what Wolfowitz had longed to do since the 1980s, when he broke from the official line of the Reagan Administration by denouncing Saddam Hussein at a time when Donald Rumsfeld, acting as Reagan's official envoy, was offering the dictator support in his conflict with Iran. Namely, Wolfowitz and his fellow neo-cons wanted to use U.S. military might to topple Saddam Hussein.


Neo-cons are not real conservatives. They are true believers who have become a power elite, while real conservatives believe power elites need to to be held in check by keeping government small.

Neo-cons are quite comfortable with other power elites — particularly money elites. In fact, many neo-cons are in the money elite. This is why a neo-con administration like Bush's is unfailingly pro-big oil, pro-big business, and pro-multinational corporation.

Let us not forget that Dick Cheney, when he wasn't in government, worked for Halliburton Energy Services, a multinational corporation with operations in over 120 countries. Halliburton's middle name is now "energy," but used to be just plain "oil." President George H. W. Bush, the current president's father, once worked for a corporation that is now part of Halliburton, Dresser Industries ... as did George H. W. Bush's father, the former Connecticut senator Prescott Bush, who when he was not in government was a Wall Street executive banker.

So when opponents of the current president and his war in Iraq wonder whether Bush went wrong out of a firm ideological commitment to neo-conservatism or out of personal loyalty to this country's entrenched power-money elites, the class into which he was born and raised, the correct answer is ... both!


We are rapidly approaching a make-or-break moment concerning the immediate future of the war in Iraq, as oldstyleliberal tried to convey in Congress Needs To Impose an Endgame in Iraq. The recent "surge" in troop strength has failed to turn the tide. Come next spring, the pressure of ongoing troop rotations will force us to reduce our military footprint in Iraq. Military sources, speaking to the news media on condition of anonymity, are saying things like that until then, "We're going to get it as stable as we can, with the troops we have, and in the time available. And then, we'll back out as carefully as we can."

It's fair to say that that's now the best-case scenario. There's no longer talk of victory of any sort, by any definition, in Iraq.

Fir that reason, real conservatives in Congress have to step up to the plate and break with the neo-con power-money elites. They need to take their rightful place in a veto-proof majority that will require a shift in policy in Iraq on the part of President Bush — specifically, a commitment to an endgame or exit strategy that will marshal our remaining military and diplomatic options in the interest of leaving the country we invaded in as stable a situation as we can manage.